Blood of the Earth

by Faith Hunter

  I spent two hours on the laptop searching through the avenues open to me—the government and nongovernment sites that the laptop allowed me into. And I found nothing.

  So I took the easiest route and contacted one of Jane Yellowrock’s business partners, Alex Younger, on e-mail and simply asked if he knew anyone who might want the vampires in the Knoxville area harmed. He sent me back a short note with links to all the online sites I had found and a dozen more, and he added a single terse paragraph at the bottom of the list.

  For what it’s worth—after Jane Yellowrock rescued and delivered the abducted fanghead to the Master of the City, Ming did a massive bleed and read of her humans and determined that a white male knew quite a lot more about the kidnapping of her blood-servant by the church leaders than he first expressed. He was sanctioned and punished by removal from the food chain, went through vamp-blood withdrawal in rehab. It’s possible that he blames the Knoxville MOC Ming Zhane of Clan Glass for his situation. He doesn’t happen to be very bright, but he might want to draw out the suckheads, hoping for a chance to hurt them. Or he might want to get back at the church people who contributed to his loss of liquid dinner. His last name is Dawson. Hang on. Looking for more.

  The name Dawson wriggled in the back of my mind like a worm on a hook, luring me in. There was something I’d read or heard about the name, maybe something in church history, from the establishment of God’s Cloud? But it wouldn’t come. Moments later, Alex sent another e-mail that said, Simon A. Dawson Jr., age thirty-three, has three prior convictions, two for assault and one for stalking. See attached rap sheet. And then it clicked. Dawson was the surname of the men Sister Erasmus had referred to as backsliders.

  I sent a polite thank-you to Alex Younger and downloaded the information. Fingers tapping on the arms of my chair, I studied the rap sheet—which stood for “record of arrest and prosecution.” Dawson was born in Knoxville. He attended Farrington High School, the school attended by two of the victims. That made my insides clench in agitation. I came up with questions but no definitive answers. I had what the cops might consider circumstantial information on a guy who might hate vampires, and nothing pointed to an HST connection or to involvement with another organization that might target vampires and their human servants. But the coincidence bothered me. Once means happenstance, twice means coincidence, three times means problems.

  How likely was it for this particular Dawson to be the church backslider? Or tied into HST? Would the FBI ask Ming about Dawson if I gave them the name? Would they call Yellowrock Securities for information? I almost smiled at the thought that I might have a source they didn’t have or wouldn’t use. When I gave them the name and the source, would they follow through? Would Rick LaFleur call Jane? I had the feeling that he might want to, very badly. Want to and not do it because of the whole man-woman thing.

  So. Unless I gave them the name, or the cops went to Ming Zhane herself, or to Jane, and asked, they might never learn the connection of Simon Dawson to the local vampires. And he wasn’t on Rick’s lists of suspects with ties to the vampires.

  I compiled all the data I had, leading with the paragraph about my confidential source suggesting that Dawson had been a blood-servant, punished with withdrawal, and sent an e-mail to Rick with an attached high school photograph I found online.

  Ten minutes later I heard a faint ding, and Rick strode from the elevator across the carpet to me, an unreadable expression on his face. He stopped a foot short of me, bent over me, and dropped his hands to the arms of my chair, using his height to intimidate me, making his body and my chair into a cage. Quietly, too quietly, his voice a cat’s low burr, he said, “How the hell did you find out something we haven’t? Have you been shielding God’s Cloud from this investigation?”

  My first reaction was shock. Then fear raced across the shock and through me like quicksilver, the fear of a child who had been beaten, the fear of a young woman who had been threatened and . . . My breath stopped; my heart raced as memories spun through me. And then fury slammed into me so fast that my skin felt like it had been set on fire. So softly even Rick, with his cat ears, had to lean in to hear, I said, “My foot is perfectly positioned to kick you. If you don’t get off me, now, I will.”

  He didn’t move.

  So I kicked him.

  And had the satisfaction of seeing him fall, his hands holding his crotch. JoJo had been right. It felt really good. Well, for me.

  The uniformed security guard was back so fast I hardly saw him arrive. I was in handcuffs faster than that. And then I was hauled upstairs, my arms lifted painfully high behind me, and thrust into a room filled with men and women in suits, each wearing the same expression—cold anger. The security guards, three of them by this time, shoved me into a chair and looped a second pair of handcuffs through the first set and wrapped them around a chair arm before latching them shut with a ratcheting click that sounded sharp and final in the quiet room. I was seated at the center of the table, my back to the door, the tabletop littered with papers and electronic devices, screens up all over the room, lit with photos of crime scenes, including one of a dead girl. She lay in weeds, fully clothed except for one shiny blue shoe, which was missing. Heart racing, I dragged my gaze away from the photograph of the body.

  On the tabletop there were dozens of laptops and tablets and papers strewn in loose pages or stacked neatly. The people sitting around the table looked tired, angry, forbidding, and a little mean.

  The man at the head of the table was older, colder, and by his expression seemed perfectly willing to have someone beat me for information. I gave him my best churchwoman smile, sweet as honey. He frowned back.

  From behind me I heard something. Or maybe felt something. Twisting around, I saw one of the guards holding a black thing about the size of a pack of cigarettes, lifting it directly over me and then along the contours of my body. I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t like it. Not one bit. Finally, he backed away, and I could see him communicating something nonverbally with the man at the head of the table.

  Rick, walking slowly and slightly bent over, took a chair across from me and placed my laptop and other things on the table between us. I didn’t look his way, not once, but when he finally got seated, he demanded, his voice slightly more breathy than usual, “Explain yourself.”

  I kept my gaze on the man at the head of the table and pulled on all my childhood accent when I answered. “’Bout what? There’s a lot I could explain, from why I ain’t adopted a new dog, to the reasons I prefer organic vegetables over ones grown with poison, to why I kicked you in the nuts. Be more specific.”

  Someone in the room started to laugh and turned it into a cough. The man who was clearly in charge steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “Why did you kick Senior Special Agent Rick LaFleur?” he asked from behind his hands.

  Everything about the man declared him to be the boss, from his steepled fingers to his fancy suit to the brass nameplate in from of him. They rest of the people had folded paper cards with their names written or printed in marker. I figured he was either right proud of his name or he came from unimaginative stock, seeing as how they’d used the name for five generations.

  “Mr. Thomas Benton the fourth,” I said, hearing the sarcasm in my tone and trying to tamp it down a mite, “I done told him to get off a me and he didn’t. I been used and abused by men all my life. Men who believed that they had a right to tell me where to go and what to do, when to get bedded, when to get married, when to pretend to be happy, and when to suffer. Men who used threat of rape to get their way.” I leaned toward the man at the head of the table, my cuffs clinking. “No man is ever, ever, goin’ to tell me what to do like I’m stupid or ten years old and too dumb to know better. Not ever again. Or threaten me again. Or hurt me again.” I looked at Rick. “You got that?”

  Neither man answered for a long-drawn-out moment. The man at the head of table spok
e from behind the protection of his fingers and asked, “Senior Special Agent LaFleur, did you by word or deed threaten or injure this young woman?”

  Rick had gone tense as the man spoke. “I suppose, by the standards under which Nell lived for most of her life, that I did appear to be about to . . .” He stopped and started again, more stiffly. “I may have appeared as if I was threatening. My apologies, Nell.”

  “Accepted,” I said, not looking his way. “Now iffen you want to know how I found out what I did, Mr. Thomas Benton the fourth”—I dropped the accent and went on—“it’s called analogical reasoning. There are two steps to analogical reasoning: recognizing that two or more things have one characteristic in common, and assuming that if they have one characteristic in common, they may have others in common. Fact one: a thirty-three-year-old man named Simon A. Dawson, a man who, so far as I can tell, has never had the brains to plan anything more complex than how to serve himself up as dinner and sex partner to vampires, has reason, in his own deluded mind, to be angry at the vampires. Fact two: two Dawson men were seen on property belonging to God’s Cloud. Fact three: someone has carried out some very complex kidnappings—possibly, but not definitively, an organization called Human Speakers of Truth. If, however, the kidnapper was Mr. Dawson, then by use of deductive reasoning, we can deduce that he didn’t act alone. You need a dictionary explanation of deductive reasoning?” I asked.

  Surprisingly the man nodded, a single incline of his head. From a girl with a church background, it was an alien gesture for a man who had been mildly insulted, one without heat, calculating and probing and totally without emotion. I realized he was curious about me and what I might know and how I might think. I said, “Deductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, or logical deduction, or, if you want to be informal, top-down logic, is the process of using one or more statements or premises to reach a logically certain conclusion. The thought process links premises with conclusions, which is somewhat different from analogical reasoning. None of the reasoning processes work perfectly alone, but using them together, they offer a chance of reaching a cogent and correct conclusion or a satisfactory correlation.

  “Back to Mr. Dawson. My use of analogical and deductive reasoning suggests that the man named Dawson, if he was the kidnapper, almost certainly had help, because he ain’t real bright and we know that three males and an unknown driver carried out the kidnappings. Now I’m moving from reasoning to instinct. Instinct is based on past experience, current information, and a lifetime of deductive, inductive, and analogical reasoning. It’s always personal and might not be based on anything one can put a finger on. Instinct says if he is a kidnapper, then he might be part of the Human Speakers of Truth.”

  The man at the head of the table said from behind his hands, “That doesn’t explain how you found the name when we have not.”

  I grinned then and looked at Rick. My tone might have been full of satisfaction. Or maybe even malice. “Actually, Sister Erasmus found it. I just researched it. I called Yellowrock Securities.”

  If it was possible for Rick LaFleur to look any worse than when I kicked him, he did. Paler. More pained. Stunned. From down the table a voice purred, “I told you to call her.” It was Occam, and his voice was gloating and growling in the way of cats. “I also told you Nell would if you didn’t.”

  I stretched against my handcuffs and looked down the table at Occam, whose eyes were on Rick. Occam’s expression shifted quickly from delighted and insulting, the way house cats look when they’ve done something they shouldn’t, to something else when he caught my eyes. He rose from his chair, moving along the table, his body slinky and graceful. He bent over me, but from the side, not making me feel trapped. I felt his breath against the side of my neck and realized he had paused in bending down to sniff my scent. The warm feel of his breath made the little hairs raise along my nape in a prickling wave, like grass moving before a summer wind. He whispered, “It’s okay, Nell, sugar. Everything is all right.” And I knew, somehow, that I’d be, forever more, Nell, sugar to him. An endearment that was totally improper for a widder-woman and a strange man. My daddy would bust a blood vessel in his brain. Embarrassment and hint of fear flushed through me, and I knew Occam could hear my heart rate speed.

  With his bare hands, Occam took the two cuff bracelets holding my wrists together and pressed them apart. The two chain links that attached one bracelet to the other separated with a soft sound of metal bending and tearing. My hands were free of the chair, and I placed them on the tabletop, still wearing the bracelets. A woman two places down from me stood and used a key to open each. Mildly, she said, “Impressive display of nonhuman strength. But keys are less destructive.”

  “I’m totally unconcerned about destruction, little lady,” Occam said, a challenge in his tone. I had a feeling that the woman had never been called a little lady before and she didn’t like it. I did, however. To Rick, Occam said, “You and me will talk about this later,” and his voice was deeper this this time, an unquestioned challenge. Occam dropped beside me to the floor, one knee down, one foot down, one elbow on his knee, and one hand on the arm of my chair, but not touching me. To me he said, “Fill us in, Nell, sugar. And don’t leave nothing out.”

  * * *

  The feds were rude and snooty and too busy to observe even the most casual, minimal form of manners; they made sure I knew I was the outsider and useless, despite my unexpected and, as they put it, accidental addition to the list of suspects. What they meant was that I had provided them with the only real, viable suspect, with ties to vamps and the church, which they had been looking for, but they didn’t have the breeding to say so. I informed them that they needed a lesson in manners and maybe a spanking with Mama’s hairbrush. They didn’t take my comments well, though the man at the head of table seemed amused. But once I finished my monologue and answered questions, they banished me from the room again. I didn’t care.

  Rick slid the keys to PsyLED’s van across the table to me. I nodded, picked up my things, and left without telling him where I’d be or asking how he and Occam would leave when they were ready. Mostly I was wondering if he was still in pain or if his were-taint abilities healed his nuts faster than a human male’s would.

  I didn’t feel guilty about kicking him. In fact, every time I thought about it I felt a welling sense of satisfaction. As if by kicking him, I’d kicked every other man who had tried to hurt me. But I also thought that maybe I shouldn’t have kicked him quite so hard. Maybe he hadn’t deserved the fear overreaction or the amount of muscle, momentum, and force I’d applied. But instead of guilt, I was carrying a sinful amount of selfish delight at having taken a stand against a man before he managed to hurt me.

  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I thought, though that particular saying had been looked down upon most strongly in the church, as it implied that women had the same position as men and might be allowed to take multiple husbands, a fundamental sin for sure. In my case, it meant that if a man could hurt me, could threaten me, then I could threaten or hurt him back. Maybe hurt him first. I was still trying to decide how I felt about that unexpected violent side of me when I unlocked the van and tossed my laptop into the passenger seat.

  It was warm inside, and I hadn’t noted the cold of the air until it was gone. I closed the van door and took in the sky and the clouds that were gathered there, and decided that we might have early snow in the hills by nightfall, a dusting, too light to stick. And something about the sight of the clouds made me want to buy some laying hens. There was nothing better than fresh eggs for breakfast and chicken and dumplings from a fresh hen for supper. And chicken poop became excellent fertilizer when it was properly handled. But chickens would be good targets for the churchmen. Maybe later. If I survived all this.

  I figured out how the van’s controls worked and started the engine, making my way through the steel gate and out of the FBI’s compound. I drove back to th
e main Knoxville library, questions about the name Dawson tangling in my mind like roots circling around a pot—getting nowhere but more tangled. I parked in back under the gnarled limbs of an oak tree, and the sight of the oak called to me, making me want to rest my face against its bark and my feet against its roots. It was a need that thrummed through me like a bass drum, low and deep. I locked the van and stepped to the trunk of the oak. No one was around, and so I placed the laptop on the ground at my feet and leaned in, laying my cheek against the rough bark, my arms around the trunk. Leaning harder, I rested my body against the trunk and took a deep cleansing breath. And relaxed. I’d no idea how exhausted I was until the tension flowed out of me and through the tree into the ground. I took another breath and let clean, healing energy flow up through the tree into me. I could feel my woods through the oak, pulling on me, calling me home, sending me energy and calm.

  I stayed hugging the oak for what felt like a short time, but later I discovered that I had lost half an hour as I communed with the tree. Tandy’s words. Occam’s words. Communing. Feeling calm and focused, I went inside the library to the computer access room and logged my new laptop on to the Internet through the library’s Wi-Fi.

  Using the laptop was much faster than using the old computers in the computer room. I could get spoiled with this. After an hour of tracking down different search words under three different search engines, I discovered a oodles of information about the church’s recent legal troubles, but there was nothing useful on the Internet about the history and establishment of God’s Cloud of Glory Church, except one hint from a World War II newspaper. The article suggested that the church was allowed to keep their land when the government stole all the other farms at pennies on the dollar, because a certain powerful senator interceded. Maybe he attended services there. That senator wasn’t named, not that it mattered. Back then newspapers didn’t mention some things because the nation was at war. What mattered was that some few hundred acres on the long hills that bordered the Tennessee Valley was left in private hands.